My dissertation research starts with a simple observation. There is a gender discrepancy in popular music artist success: although men and women each make up roughly half of our population, only about one quarter of the successful popular music stars are female in the United States commercial market. Billboard sales or airplay charts, available since 1940, show that women performed less than a quarter of the number one hits in any year up to the present. Similarly, female solo artists or bands with at least one female member make up only about 25% of the 100 most successful acts each year. The motivating question for this project is to explain why this is the case: why are women disproportionately less successful on the charts than men?

Existing explanations for this discrepancy are varied. Perhaps the most obvious explanation is that few women pursue popular music careers up to the point that they would be soliciting major label attention: 1) in public schools boys receive more social status from forming bands, tend to orient their socializing activity around being in a band more than girls, and frequently exclude girls from membership in their bands while girls do not tend to exclude boys from their bands; 2) when parents buy instruments for their children, boys are more likely to receive instruments better suited for popular music; and 3) women have less available leisure time to pursue unpaid musical activities, and have difficulty gaining entrance into local music worlds as competent artists. These are some of the explanations offered in existing literature, all concentrating on artists at early career stages.

But women who nonetheless pursue a popular music career despite these pressures could still face additional barriers erected by the music industry or commercial market. Female artists have sometimes complained of sexist behavior of music industry personnel, limited or derogatory artistic roles available to them, and offensive treatment by the popular and music press. Conversely, they may be a favored commodity. In Pop Stars and Gender I offer unique aggregate-level data to speak to these different explanations. This dissertation is unique in that is addresses the motivating question with quantitative data previously unavailable in the literature, sampling a population of artists that has received less attention from social researchers (most likely due to problems of access). Of course, the three quantitative chapters presented here cannot alone provide a complete explanation of this demographic discrepancy, but they do provide an important addition to the literature already existing about gender dynamics in earlier career stages. In addition, this project provides a useful starting point for further research by outlining the demographics of successful popular music artists.

The first chapter describes artist types as defined by artist moods and styles available in the data, outlining patterns of representation favored by promoters. The research question speaks to the claim that available artistic roles are more limited for women than men, and does so by looking specifically at artist character types. Because one cannot understand gendered artist types without also looking at race and sexuality, this chapter explores the issue of identity more broadly. I show that the personas of female and minority artists are sexualized to a much greater degree than the personas of white, male artists. The second empirical chapter explores the decisions of music promoters, concluding that it is indeed harder for new female artists to break into the mainstream because promoters tend to favor new male artists. However, once new female artists break into the top 100 sales charts, promoters give them proportionately more attention than their male counterparts, making it easier for female artists to stay on the charts once they get their first hit. The third empirical chapter asks, using the artist character types outlined in the first empirical chapter, whether or not promoters and listeners favor the same artist types. Given that non-white and non-male artists are pushed into limited artistic roles, is this because listeners want limited character types from female and minority artists, or because these are the only character types promoters make available to their listeners? This chapter shows significant differences between the preferences of promoters and listeners, suggesting that both explanations may apply. Some of these differences can be explained by the divergent preferences of male and female listeners. Others are better explained by the argument that promoters are putting money into some artist types – both female and male types – that listeners either do not or no longer enjoy.

In sum, this dissertation shows that record industry does marginally contribute to the gender discrepancy on the charts, although it cannot specify to what extent relative to other explanations. Promoters favor some female artists, most likely because there are so few women in the pool of hopefuls from which promoters choose, but they focus on a small handful of female artists that have been previously successful (examples in the project data included Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and others that dominated the charts in 2003), while devoting proportionately less attention to the rest. They also focus their promotional energy on a narrow range of artistic roles for women, the same roles on which feminist critics of popular culture have focused their attention. Thus, there is some empirical support for female artists’ complaints that they have fewer artistic choices than men, and that they are ignored by their labels and/or managers. Importantly, however, the last chapter suggests promoters’ behavior in this regard is partially explained by the preferences of popular music consumers.